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About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Wikirunner is an a chase game inspired by Jeremy Bushnell's Wikipedian Tag. Created for Mini Ludum Dare #12 (the theme was 'Wikipedia'), two players are given a random Wikipedia page each, and then 'the chaser' must try to navigate his or her way to the same page as their opponent, while 'the runner' must try to stay off the same page as the chaser for as long as possible.

Both players can only move to another Wiki page if it has some relevance to the page they are currently on - so for example, you could move from 'London Olympics' to '2012', but not from 'Russia' to 'kangaroo'. The chaser also gets two goes for every one of the runner's goes, to give him a fair chance. The game can be played in a 2-player hotseat style, or 1 vs AI, or AI vs AI (if you want to watch how the program thinks).

By far the most fun mode is an AI chaser vs a player runner. It's interesting to see the choices the AI makes - at one point I changed to 'Canada', so the AI jumped over to a page on 'Dumbledore's Army'. Escaping to the Wiki page for 'Iraq', the program then tried to follow me by bringing up the page for 'The Manchester Evening News', which just so happens to be my local newspaper strangely enough.